MyFantasyLeague.com

Happy New Year from all of us at MyFantasyLeague.com! We hope your fantasy football season was a success! As you shake off the effects of your fantasy championship party, or your New Year’s Eve party, don’t forget that you can still play fantasy football for 4 more weeks if you want to keep the fun going until the Superbowl. Just check out our Free NFL Playoff Leagues to get started with some postseason fantasy football excitement.  It’s free and it only takes a minute to start a league before this weekend’s games.

Holly Skin

As the holidays approach, most of you are probably wrapping up your championship season or drowning in your sorrows after another fantasy football playoff opportunity passed you by.  In either case, now is a great time to explore our holiday themed skins.  You can use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup > Select a Skin” screen to change the skin for your league as needed.  The Holly Skin is appropriate for this week, and the Happy New Year skin is perfect for next week.

We also added a new option recently to allow you to select a “Seasonal Skin” for your league.  If you choose this option, then your league will automatically use the skin that is most appropriate for the time of year.

Happy Holidays from all of us at MyFantasyLeague.com!  And don’t forget about our Free NFL Playoff Leagues if you can’t get enough fantasy football and you want to keep your season going until the Superbowl!

It happens to some leagues every year.  Your fantasy league playoffs have arrived.  Excitement is at a fever pitch for the teams involved.  Then the unthinkable happens.  After the clock hits zero and the final scores are in, a fantasy playoff game ends in a tie!  Now what?  Well, hopefully your league constitution has a provision for tie games in the playoffs.  But if not, then you are in a bind and it will boil down to a tough call by the commissioner of the league.  That’s why they pay the commissioner the big bucks, right!?  Yeah, right.  In all honestly, about the only “fair” option you have for a situation like this is to use a coin toss to decide the winner.  Then be sure to add some rules to your constitution to handle this situation in the future.

Here is some more discussion to potentially help your league think through it all in case it helps…

We’ve had some leagues contact us and ask if it is possible to have both teams advance and have a 3-way playoff game the next week.  While it is certainly possible, it really is not fair at all to the team that was supposed to play the winner if you decide to handle it this way.   Now that third team has to beat two teams in Week #16 instead of just the winner of the Week #15 game.  What if one of those tied teams scores twice as much as the other in Week #16, and the third team scores somewhere in the middle?  Think about it.  That team would have won if the tie-breaker fell one way the previous week, and would have lost if the tie-breaker fell the other way. But now he loses no matter what.  Not ideal.

If you want to get a feel for what some other leagues do to resolve tie games in the playoffs, read on for some ideas that are used in various leagues at MyFantasyLeague.com…

• Some leagues break the tie by awarding the win to the higher seeded team, or the team with more total points during the regular season, or something along those lines.  Basically, in the case of a tie, they go back to the performance during the regular season to reward the team that did better all season long.
• Some leagues give a fantasy “home point advantage” of 1 or 1.5 points to the team with the “home” game, which is generally the team with the higher seed going into the playoffs.
• Some leagues use bench points, or the highest scoring starter, or the highest scoring non-kicker, etc.  Basically, they break the tie by various means within each team’s roster to help reward the team with the better depth or the better top performer.

There are lots of ideas, but the key of course is to make this decision before it happens.  So after you make a tough decision about this year’s unforeseen situation, be sure to hammer out the details of your tie-breakers for next year!

Just because the NFL regular season is nearing the end, that doesn’t mean your fantasy football season has to be almost over, too.

MyFantasyLeague.com is once again offering free NFL Playoffs leagues for the 2008 NFL post-season, running throughout the NFL playoffs, from Wild Card Weekend (Week 18) through Super Bowl Sunday (Week 21).

People typically run fantasy leagues in the NFL post-season in one of two ways:

1. Like a traditional total points only fantasy league, whereby you have a draft and a roster, and you accumulate points for each week of the season.  Since it’s a total points only league, you don’t have head-to-head matchups, and therefore, you don’t have to worry about having an even number of teams in your league.
2. A contest-style, “start ‘em once” type league, where you don’t have a roster, and you can start anyone you’d like.  But, once you start a player one time, you cannot start him again later in the post-season.  This type of league adds an additional element of strategy to your lineup selection, because you not only have to select players based on how many points you think he’ll get, but also, based on how deep you think a given player’s team will go into the post-season.

If you’re interested in learning more about NFL Playoffs leagues, along with more detailed rule suggestions, please see this page.

We’re happy to announce the availability of MFLLive, an iPhone application that offers live scoring for your MyFantasyLeague.com-hosted league.

So, if you have an iPhone, we’d love for you to download and install it, and give it a spin for the last few weeks of the 2008 season, and let us know what you think.  Our goal is to work with the folks at 290Design more this off-season to make many enhancements to this so it’s got even more functionality for the 2009 season.

As noted earlier this week, we conducted our customer survey to get your feedback.  We appreciate all of your opinions and comments, and we’ll be digesting the information over the course of the next few months to help make MyFantasyLeague.com a better product in 2009.

Now you can conduct your own survey within your league by using the League Poll function to conduct a poll.  This is a great option to use if your league is considering new rules for next season or if you want to get a feel for how your owners liked certain aspects of your league. You can also use the polls to pose silly questions or non-fantasy football related questions each week to keep the league interesting as well.

To create a poll, just use the “Communications > League Polls” menu item.  From that screen, you can view all previous polls, or click on the link to Create a New Poll.  You just type the question along with the possible answers, and then you are all set.  There are  various options, such as putting a deadline on the poll and hiding the answers until after the deadline.  You can also make a poll be multiple choice and allow more than one answer.  There is a short cut to make all of the Franchise Names become poll answers, which is great when asking questions like “which franchise will…”

After you create a poll, your team owners can use the “Communications > League Polls” menu item to view it and to cast their vote.  Better yet, you can use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup > Home Page Modules and Tabs Setup” screen to add the Newest League Poll home page module to your league home page.  That way everybody will see the poll each time they visit your league, and they’ll be more likely to view it and cast their vote.

There is also a Newest Commissioner’s Poll home page module to highlight the most recent poll that was created by the commissioner.  You can choose whether or not to allow owners as well as the commissioner to create polls for your league.

Have fun at the polls!  Be sure to use the league poll function to ask your owners questions about rules or anything else that you need answered here before the season ends.

Now that the season is winding down, it’s time for our annual customer survey to find out what you liked and disliked about MyFantasyLeague.com in 2008.  Please take a moment to give us your feedback about our site. We sincerely appreciate any and all comments, both good and bad.  As always, we’ll take your input and use it to improve MyFantasyLeague.com in 2009 and beyond.

You can use the “Help > Take a Survey” menu item from your league home page to access the survey.  As an incentive and a way to say “thanks for your feedback”, we will be selecting 20 random surveys at the end of this week and sending them a free MyFantasyLeague.com t-shirt!

Harvest Skin

The holiday season is here, and you’re probably already seeing Christmas decorations everywhere you look.  Time flies when you’re having a good fantasy football season!  We have various skins for all of the holidays and seasons throughout the year, and Thanksgiving is no different.  Be sure to check out our Harvest Skin and our Turkey Skin if you want to spruce up your league’s appearance this week.  You can use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup > Select a Skin” screen to change the skin for your league as needed.

Turkey Skin

Keep in mind that if your league is using a Template then you cannot select a skin. You would have to use the “Setup > Select a Template” screen to turn off your template first (by selecting “None” as your template).  Then after that you can select a skin as needed.

Also remember that we’re still looking for ideas and suggestions for new skins to add to our selection.  Add a comment to this post to contribute an idea, or use the “Help > Help Center” screen in your league to submit a suggestion that way.  We’ll tally all of the suggestions for the rest of November and then put it to a vote in December to see what new skin(s) we should add to the site!

It’s that time of year again.  The regular season is winding down for most fantasy football leagues, and the playoff picture is starting to come into view, with probably half of the teams in the league still “on the bubble” and needing a crucial victory here in the next week or two.

Sample Playoff Bracket

You can start preparing for your playoffs now by setting up your playoff bracket(s) for your league.  Use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Playoff Setup” section to create a bracket for your league.  Start with the “Packaged Playoff Bracket” or the “General Playoff Setup” section depending on your needs.  As long as you know how many fantasy teams will make it to your playoffs, and how many weeks you want the playoffs to last, the system can create a bracket for you in no time, such as the example pictured here.  There are a lot of options and you can set up multiple brackets if you want, but most leagues will only need one championship bracket (even with multiple divisions/conferences) and some will also include a loser bracket and/or a third place bracket.

Then after the bracket(s) are created, you can use the “Seed Playoff Teams” screen to place the appropriate teams into the bracket(s) based on your league’s rules.  After that, you’ll be good to go. You can even add the bracket to your league home page as a home page module for quick and easy reference.  As always, if you have any questions or problems setting up the playoffs or any part of your league, you can use the “Help > Help Center” to get quick answers to common questions about the topic, or to submit a question to our support team.

On a related note, we also offer free NFL Playoff Leagues.  These are separate from your League’s Fantasy Playoffs, and allow you to run a completely separate league after the NFL regular season is over.  You can also continue your fantasy league into the NFL postseason if you want for that matter.  Watch for more news and an announcement about our NFL Playoff leagues early in December.

Hunting Skin

It’s been a while since we added some new “skins” to our growing list, so we’re happy to announce a few new ones.  First, we have a seasonal entry with the Hunting Skin.  A lot of you will surely be heading out to the woods this month to enjoy some hunting.  Your commissioner can use the “For Commissioners > Setup > Appearance Setup > Select a Skin” menu item to select this new skin for your league if you and your leaguemates want to get psyched up for your hunting trip.

Fishing Skin

On a similar theme, we’ve also added a Fishing Skin for those of you that are into angling.  Note that if your commissioners has allowed it, each individual owner can also choose their own skin by using the “For Owners > Franchise Setup” menu item.   From that screen, you can click on the “Skin” link at the top of that screen.

We also added a new Archery Skin and a Racing Skin to round out our sport-themed additions to our skin library this month.  Next month we plan to add more skins, so we are looking for suggestions and ideas from our customers to help guide us on what themes we should add.  Please add a comment to this blog post, or use the “Help > Help Center” screen in your league to submit a suggestion for a skin that you would like to see added to MyFantasyLeague.com in December.  We’ll take suggestions for the rest of November and then put it to a vote to pick the best suggestions!